Odd Bedfellows in Realigned Big East Bond Over Basketball

Grant Gibbs is a senior point guard for Creighton, with neat brown hair and cornflower blue eyes. He was raised in Marion, a small city in eastern Iowa, where his mother was a home economics teacher at the local high school. His father works at the Quaker Oats cereal distribution factory in Cedar Rapids.

“He’s kind of on the forefront of making Cap’n Crunch,” Gibbs said.

Seated by the window at the Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers, in Manhattan, Gibbs watched the choppy waters of the Hudson River drift past. Several yachts were docked nearby. He was facing west, toward Nebraska, the edge of the frontier for the new Big East Conference, at least for now.

Creighton, one of three Midwest teams to have joined the new league, along with Butler and Xavier, informed its players about the move out of the Missouri Valley Conference while on a charter jet to Philadelphia for the second round of the N.C.A.A. tournament. Gibbs said the focus at the time had remained on beating their next opponent, Cincinnati.

“But once you put the names with the faces and the schools that we’d be competing with, the cities we’d be going to, the arenas, it all kind of came to life,” Gibbs said. “It’s pretty surreal to be in this situation.”

Dalí might not have conjured a more surrealistic vision than the layout of Wednesday’s Big East basketball media day, which pinned Creighton’s table next to Georgetown’s, Butler’s next to that of St. John’s, and Xavier’s across from Villanova’s, perhaps so they could all introduce each other.

Val Ackerman, the conference’s commissioner, made a point of not mentioning the blue-blood programs that had departed. (As a refresher, they were Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Louisville and Notre Dame.) Most of them were paragons of conference tournament success at Madison Square Garden. All of them were beholden to their football programs.

That, coaches and administrators reiterated over and over on Wednesday, is what made the new Big East distinct, bonding a Creighton with a Georgetown. The conference’s 10 programs bleed basketball.

“It’s not like a ‘Sesame Street’ deal — which one doesn’t belong,” St. John’s Coach Steve Lavin said. “You’ve got a tree, a bush, some seaweed and then a truck. It just didn’t fit. I think now we have a league that’s more similar.”

The league, originally termed the Catholic 7 before the new Midwestern programs jumped in, will undoubtedly miss the defending national champion Cardinals, as well as Connecticut, Rutgers, Cincinnati and South Florida, which are in what is now known as the American Athletic Conference (the revamped and reorganized Big East), which held its media day Wednesday in Memphis.

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Lavin insisted that the ties here were stronger. He said he strongly supported Ackerman, who said the conference had no plans to expand in the near future. Lavin also said he appreciated the league’s effort to revive the basketball-focused intentions of Dave Gavitt, the founder of the original conference.

“It’s a return to our roots, and yet there are some fresh aspects to it,” Lavin said. “We’re adding schools like Xavier, Butler and Creighton in the Midwest, and yet their profile, history and tradition fits so nicely with the schools located in the Northeast.”

For Lavin and other coaches in the room, there also seemed to be a sense of relief. Conference realignment had taken its toll on everybody, and a year ago at this time, many of those programs did not know where they might be headed. So they chose to forgo some tradition and familiar road trips to unite, and they handpicked a like-minded leader in Ackerman, the former president of the W.N.B.A. and U.S.A. Basketball.

“I don’t have any negative things to say about football, but I’m a basketball head,” Ackerman said. “We’re going to make sure this is basketball at its best. We have 22 sports in our league, but I can tell you that basketball will be the centerpiece.”

Five teams from the current configuration reached the N.C.A.A. tournament last year, and four teams have played in at least one Final Four in the past six seasons. Marquette, a conference co-champion last season, was the preseason pick to win it again this year, with Georgetown second.

Creighton, headlined by the senior forward Doug McDermott, a two-time all-American, was picked to finish third, although the team is a bit of a mystery to Northeastern opponents. Playing in the M.V.C. since 1976, and based in Omaha, the Bluejays have not faced any member of their current conference besides Providence, Xavier and DePaul since 1998.

By now, however, these coaches know how to get past their fear of the unknown.

“We brought in three programs, not just three good teams,” Georgetown Coach John Thompson III said. “They’ve withstood the test of time. They’re going to be good, they have been good, and that’s why we’re excited/slash/scared to have all three as part of this group.”

Correction: October 17, 2013

An earlier version of this article omitted one of the few current Big East members that Creighton has played since 1998. In addition to Providence and Xavier, it has faced DePaul.